I HATE MY JOB: A Journal Of A Day At The Office

by Jeff Lutz & O.C. Newby

It starts as soon as I get out of my car and walk by the smokers.  Every ten minutes, they’re filing in and out of the office for what they like to call a “smoke break.”  The only consolation:  they probably have lung cancer.

I sit down at my cubicle and look around.  I’m like a rat trapped in some kind of experiment.  Why three walls?  I’m not an actor in a play!  I look up.  Oh, God.  It’s the Happy-Go-Lucky Morning Guy.  He is ALWAYS in a good mood.  “How was your weekend?  Are you working hard or hardly working?”  he says, laughing at his own joke.  Well, I just walked in the door and sat down so what do you think?  I can’t wait until Happy-Go-Lucky Morning Guy becomes a victim of this competitive environment.  We’ll see how happy he is then.

The Young Gun struts by and hands me three memos.  “This proposal is red hot.  Let’s hit a home run and expand the pie.”  Punk brat.  He thinks he knows everything because he went to some fancy school that ends in University.  I start typing up a report - Is this project pigs or chickens? - only to be interrupted by Forward Guy.  He’s going to “shoot” me an email.  Please read string below.  This guy has more communication with me than my Domestic Dependent Plus One.  Chain letters, page-and-a-half-long jokes, wildly inappropriate pictures.  Today, it’s a video of Spencer Pratt getting f*cked by an emu which he thinks is hilarious!

The Random Intern roller skates in with a huge smile on his face.  Forward Guy shouts at him, “You’re rockin’ and rollin today!”  I guess it must be the third Wednesday of the month again.  Apparently, he’s got flexible hours.  He looks high.  He always looks high.  I wish I was high.

I go back to working on my report.  I’m interrupted by Fantasy Sports Guy.  He tries to talk me into joining his hockey league.  “It’s going to be awesome, dude!  You don’t even have to know anything about hockey.”  Yeah, clearly you and I are not on the same page.  Like I’m going to sign my life away for the next eight months to follow a bunch of Russians and Slovakians I’ve never heard of.  Besides, I already have way too much on my plate.

Meanwhile, an idiotic cross cube phone conversation has broken out nearby.  Let’s Get Personal Girl is in crisis mode.  She uses her problem solving skills to yack about her current boyfriend’s erectile dysfunction (clearly, someone dropped the ball) to The Flirt who is sitting a mere three feet away from her.   The Flirt is over forty, career-minded and self-motivated.  She is the HR department.  She’d be the first person to file a sexual harassment complaint to herself when she tries to rub her tits up against every guy in the office.  Talk about putting the cart before the horse.  She drones on and on about her kids.  She always drones on and on about her kids.  “Oh, you’re not going to believe what my little Adam did this morning.  He made himself his very own bowl of cereal and then ate it with a knife because we didn’t have any clean spoons in the house.”  I wish she’d take it offline already because I really don’t give a f*ck!

The only thing worse than the people who talk about their kids all day are the people who talk about their pets.  Crazy Cat Lady, for example, doesn’t need a man in her life because she has as she says “eighteen little furry babies to keep her company.”  She needs to internalize that sh*t about her best of breed before I push back and throw her under the bus.  Crazy Cat Lady SLAMS down on her keyboard.  She thinks she is moving forward in a productive manner but to me it’s just a big dog and pony show!